Private
citizens also formed land companies and sent out surveyors,
regardless of treaties. Bold frontiersmen went into No Man's Land
and staked out their claims. In the very year when disaster
turned the Boone party back, James Harrod had entered Kentucky
from Pennsylvania and had marked the site of a settlement.
* The activities of the great land companies are described in
Alvord's exhaustive work, "The Mississippi Valley in British
Politics."
Ten years earlier (1763), the King had issued the famous and much
misunderstood Proclamation restricting his "loving subjects" from
the lands west of the mountains. The colonists interpreted this
document as a tyrannous curtailment of their liberties for the
benefit of the fur trade. We know now that the portion of this
Proclamation relating to western settlement was a wise provision
designed to protect the settlers on the frontier by allaying the
suspicions of the Indians, who viewed with apprehension the
triumphal occupation of that vast territory from Canada to the
Gulf of Mexico by the colonizing English. By seeking to compel
all land purchase to be made through the Crown, it was designed
likewise to protect the Indians from "whisky purchase," and to
make impossible the transfer of their lands except with consent
of the Indian Council, or full quota of headmen, whose joint
action alone conveyed what the tribes considered to be legal
title.
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